I just added Showtime to my DirecTV lineup. I tried to schedule a program from ST and quickly found out that ST channels are not in the .dat file under the .xmltv folder. Not knowing any better I manually added them. I also get hundreds of warning messages every time I download my sat lineup. Just ignore 'em. Even if I reconfigure they reappear in a few days.

Question, is there a format so I can manually skip a range of channels and/or add/change entries without reconfiguring?

The first place to edit lineups (especially with big ones) is on the SD web site. We try and group channels by category and you can turn on/off whole categories or sort it numerically and do it there. You can use the standard "click/Shift-click" method to work with ranges. This works with all applications of course, and controls what is downloaded from the server.

As you noted, XMLTV's tv_grab_na_dd also has the ability to remove channels. The channel data is still downloaded, but not converted to XMLTV format. Instead of editing the config file, I recommend you use --configure to build it. Removing channels you know you won't care about from the SD page first will make tv_grab_na_dd run faster whenever you download data.

When new channels are added by Tribune, they are automatically added to your lineup (not something we can change at the moment... #1 request!). tv_grab_na_dd will warn you about the new channel. You can prevent these warnings with the "--auto-config add" or "--auto-config ignore" switches depending on how you want to deal with the new channels. Most people want to ignore them. IIRC the current --configure asks you how you want to deal with new channels and stores the choice in the config file, but I've always used the --auto-config switch.

Thanks for reminding me, got the lineup all cleaned up. I did notice that channel names for Showtime and TMC were "Pay". Probable for all PPV??? I modified Record_This to display the real name, not Pay.

that's pretty weird... I'd be interested to see the XML for those channel definitions in the XMLTV file (<channel> tag) as well as the raw SD (<station> tag). With tv_grab_na_dd you can save a copy of the raw SD file with the "--dd-data filename" switch.

As soon as you said XML I knew what the problem was. Not weird, dumb! I wrote my own XML scanner and to simplify what the user saw for channel name I picked the shortest <display-name>. Pay only has 3 letters. Problem fixed.

Record_This uses Date, Previously-Shown and Episode-Num to sort out really new shows, reruns and duplicates stuff. Does all this correctly but I understand there is a flag called 'New' in the SD data. In the How Come Department, how come we don't see this in our download or translated downloads? Are there other new flags? I don't know about other Apps but RT won't fail just because I didn't code for all fields, it just skips over them. Or maybe the flags are there but RT doesn't display them. Are they there??